“She created today’s housing crisis, she produced the banking crisis, she created the benefits crisis. It was her government that started putting people on incapacity benefits rather than register them as unemployed because the Britain she inherited was broadly at full employment.“She decided when she wrote off our manufacturing industry that she could live with two or three million unemployed and the legacy of that, the benefits bill that we are still struggling with today.

“In actual fact, every real problem we face today is the legacy of the fact she was fundamentally wrong.”

He also said that it was to Tony Blair’s “shame” that he “broadly carried on” most of her policies.

Adams, the Sinn Fein president, who was banned from the airwaves by Thatcher’s government during the Troubles, said she would be “especially remembered for her shameful role during hunger strikes. Her Irish policy failed miserably.”